John 1 part 3

AND NOW WE HAVE SEEN HIS GLORY

glory - At once the Jewish reader would have thought of the Tabernacle. The place where God would concentrate Himself and where His glory would dwell. There were times that Moses and the Priests had to back off because the glory of God was shining so bright in this place. They had to be careful with the glory. ‘Shakeena' or 'God’s glorious presence’ is the word the Priests would use to refer God’s glory. And Jesus’ flesh now becomes the new Shakeena.

“Shine Jesus shine, fill this land with the Father’s glory” - But there is just one problem to that lyric...

Throughout the rest of the Gospel, John describes the central exhibit of Jesus’ GLORY as the fact that He was killed. In John 12, Jesus finally tells us that His hour has come - up to this point John has been foreshadowing the cross saying that His hour had not yet come - And remarkably Jesus says at that time that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be GLORIFIED! "Truly I tell you that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain. But if it dies, it produces many grains."

Immediately we step back and ask ourselves: how can this be. We are surely not use to seeing the death of our champion as glorious. Only a racist heart glories in the death of a Martin Luther King Jr, only an evil heart glories in the death of a President Lincoln... We are not use to thinking of our champions death as glorious.

Jesus died on the cross, and His followers looked on. He died on a torture instrument that the Romans adopted in order to terrorize their enemies. The Romans took Jesus’ life and His dignity through a state sponsored terror event that was meant for anybody who could see or hear saying to the onlookers -- Cesar is lord and don’t you forget it!

Now where is the glory there? Glory on a cross?? A closer analogy to the onlookers of that day could possibly even be Glory through drug overdose... Glory on an electric chair??

But the Gospel finds glory there! Because the death of Jesus Christ will feed whole nations with the Bread of Life. Jesus body sown like a grain into the ground will send its roots down and its stock up until He bursts from the ground with life. For everybody who will believe in Him, who will believe that He saves...

This is what the Gospel cries out from that day of Resurrection to today. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.